calling #1 the “runt of the litter” and saying, “He is Caucasian, his nose is not too broad.”95 But this was not the only concern about #1. Cooper wrote, “It was agreed to modify the facial expression to be less soulful and ‘more intensely searching.’ ” Less soulful? Why would the lead soldier need to be less soulful? And since when are soulful and searching at odds? This is baffling. Another item on the list reads, “Left arm and hand too limp.” Lecky wrote, “The bent wrist holding the rifle on many figures seems contrived and more appropriate to a ballet than a military situation.”96 Ballet? Since when are bent wrists part of the line of a dancer? Gaylord called this concern ridiculous and added that he didn’t do limp wrists. The comments on figure #3 include, “Face looks too sweet, adjust mouth/lips.” Figure #5 is “too tired, dead in the water, totally panicked, ok to be stressed out but show more determination.” Figure #6 is “not acceptable, looks like he is sleeping, also looks like has he has a disdainful expression.” Figure #12 is “too pregnant.” Too pregnant?
Brown generated his own list in response to the visit. His list of required changes included the following: “The fatness of the lips to be reduced”; “the eyes often seem unfocused, drugged”; “the number of open mouths needs to be drastically reduced”; and perhaps most striking, “there is an excess of novelty in the faces.” In this context, what exactly is an excess of novelty? He also complained that #1’s lips were “too pouty.” Kent Cooper summarized the responses: “There was a lack of alertness and purpose in most of the faces. There was a minimum sense of being in a place of potential danger.”97 Noses too broad? Lips too fat? Wrists too limp? Too pregnant? The figuring of the soldier here is remarkable. It seems impossible not to conclude that standards of masculinity, heroism, and whiteness were being articulated—indeed, mandated.98 The wrists of the figures as they stand on the Mall are not limp, but the noses are broad and the lips remain fat on nearly all the figures. They are fascinatingly racially indistinct and racialized at the same time, which must be what Cooper means by “traces of race.”
Frank Gaylord still bristles at this language. More than ten years after the memorial was completed, his frustration with the committees’ involvement in shaping the figures is still palpable. Gaylord saw the figures as elements in a single composition. He understood each figure as part of something else, moving together in complicated unison. He sought to render expressive figures that reflected his own experience of war; he wanted something real. But the fussing of the committee, for whom what the individuals looked like was paramount, thwarted this vision.99
For the committee, getting the racing and gendering of the figures right trumped Gaylord’s composition and his desire to express something particular about the war. Pregnant, limp-wristed soldiers on the Mall would apparently not inspire the kind of future sacrifice they wanted. Further, this gendering of the soldiers seems linked to bigger questions about the Cold War. Historian Robert Dean has written about an “imperial brotherhood” of Cold War political elites powerfully shaped by a “ideology of masculinity.”100 He claims, in fact, that the wagers of the Cold War were blinded by the demands of the masculinist ideologies of their moment. He contends that waging and losing the Cold War conflicts, which simple logic and elite educations might have kept these empirically minded people out of, were linked to ideas about masculinity that have not been adequately explored. The criticisms of these figures are certainly suggestive in this context. They suggest that the anxieties about masculinity that propelled the war also shaped the memorial.
The impressionistic stylistics do something significant to the figures that the ad hoc committee did not address: it blinds them, in a sense. The soldiers have enormous eyes—enormous but hollow eyes. The impression of a pupil is created by just that, an impression. Thus the soldiers, to be honored, to be finally remembered, have no capacity to look. In thinking about the visual and visuality, the idea of the gaze, the power to look and see is central. Representation of the gaze is connected to giving and wielding power. The most powerless in the realm of visual representation are those without the gaze. Gaylord clearly did not intend the figures to be blind; they are, in fact, looking. And he thought a good deal about where and how they are looking. But when you notice the hollowed eyes, it is hard not to see this tension. It is hard not to notice that the enormous, looming soldiers intended to be celebrated and honored by this memorial are represented as empty-eyed. Gaylord may not agree, but this seems like a successful strategy for him. He managed to find a way to humanize his composition despite all the pressure to produce generic masculine heroes. His figures “without the gaze,” in fact, seem to have the “thousand-yard stare.” They are, despite the interference, remarkable. They save the memorial from being devoid of meaning beyond the most obvious patriotic pomp.101
FIGURE 6. Korean War Veterans Memorial. (Photo by Hank Savage.)
These elements in the battle to figure the soldier in this war memorial make painfully clear both the importance of representing the soldier in particular terms—heroic, manly, gallant, not-too-not-white, virile, successful, and so on—and the difficulties of constructing memory in these terms. Barry Schwartz argues that the “dignity of the veteran is affirmed by representing his identification with the state.”102 This seems right but was not enough for the builders of this memorial. The veterans sought straightforward acknowledgment of their service and sacrifice. The ABMC and the eventual architects required identifying with the state and defining the soldier in very particular terms.
SERVICE AND DISSERVICE IN THE MEMORIAL
In 1969, a young Bill Clinton wrote a now infamous letter explaining his position on the Vietnam War draft. In it he raised questions about the legitimacy of the draft system: “No government really rooted in limited, parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its citizens fight and kill and die in a war they may oppose, a war which even possibly may be wrong, a war which, in any case, does not involve immediately the peace and freedom of the nation.”103 He continued, “The draft was justified in World War II because the life of the people collectively was at stake. Individuals had to fight if the nation was to survive, for the lives of their countrymen and their way of life. Vietnam is no such case. . . . Nor was Korea, an example where, in my opinion, certain military action was justified but the draft was not, for the reasons stated above.”104 He ends the letter, “I am writing too in the hope that my telling this one story will help you to understand more clearly how so many fine people have come to find themselves still loving their country but loathing the military, to which you and other good men have devoted years, lifetimes, of the best service you could give. To many of us it is no longer clear what is service and what is disservice.”
It is just this fissure that the Korean War Veterans Memorial sought to breach. The men and women pushed by the Vietnam War to loathe the military could see in the determined grief of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial an expression of their sense of loss and disconnection. The Memorial Advisory Board and the American Battle Monuments Commission explicitly sought, early in the era of the all-volunteer military, to rewrite that logic for understanding military service. They wanted to equate service with honor and to express pride and gratitude. To do this, they avoided the problem that had so vexed the young Clinton: what the soldiers were doing in the world. They inscribed the insistently generic words, “Our Nation Honors Her Uniformed Sons and Daughters Who Answered Their Country’s Call to Defend a Country They Did Not Know and a People They Had Never Met,” at the feet of a line of nineteen marching figures because more detail about the war or the vital interests at stake would muddy the waters, would get in the way of the great marching men.
In 1995, President Bill Clinton stood before the crowd gathered for the dedication of the Korean War Veterans Memorial and hailed the memorial as “a magnificent reminder of what is best about the United States.”105 What Clinton celebrated in the memorial was the diversity of those who served, the traces of race that barely survived the memorial process: “In this impressive monument
